by Will Durant
One day, at the height of his reign, Ming Huang received ambassadors from Korea, who brought him important messages written in a dialect which none of his ministers could understand. “What!” exclaimed the Emperor, “among so many magistrates, so many scholars and warriors, cannot there be found a single one who knows enough to relieve us of vexation in this affair? If in three days no one is able to decipher this letter, every one of your appointments shall be suspended.”
For a day the ministers consulted and fretted, fearing for their offices and their heads. Then Minister Ho Chi-chang approached the throne and said: “Your subject presumes to announce to your Majesty that there is a poet of great merit, called Li, at his house, who is profoundly acquainted with more than one science; command him to read this letter, for there is nothing of which he is not capable.” The Emperor ordered Li to present himself at court immediately. But Li refused to come, saying that he could not possibly be worthy of the task assigned him, since his essay had been rejected by the mandarins at the last examination for public office. The Emperor soothed him by conferring upon him the title and robes of doctor of the first rank. Li came, found his examiners among the ministers, forced them to take off his boots, and then translated the document, which announced that Korea proposed to make war for the recovery of its freedom. Having read the message, Li dictated a learned and terrifying reply, which the Emperor signed without hesitation, almost believing what Ho whispered to him—that Li was an angel banished from heaven for some impish deviltry.40* The Koreans sent apologies and tribute, and the Emperor sent part of the tribute to Li. Li gave it to the innkeeper, for he loved wine.
On the night of the poet’s birth his mother—of the family of Li—had dreamed of Tai-po Hsing, the Great White Star, which in the West is called Venus. So the child was named Li, meaning plum, and sur-named Tai-po, which is to say, The White Star. At ten he had mastered all the books of Confucius, and was composing immortal poetry. At twelve he went to live like a philosopher in the mountains, and stayed there for many years. He grew in health and strength, practised swordsmanship, and then announced his abilities to the world: “Though less than seven (Chinese) feet in height, I am strong enough to meet ten thousand men.”41 (“Ten thousand” is Chinese for many.) Then he wandered leisurely about the earth, drinking the lore of love from varied lips. He sang a song to the “Maid of Wu”:
Wine of the grapes,
Goblets of gold—
And a pretty maid of Wu—
She comes on pony-back; she is fifteen.
Blue-painted eyebrows—
Shoes of pink brocade—
Inarticulate speech—
But she sings bewitchingly well.
So, feasting at the table,
Inlaid with tortoise-shell,
She gets drunk in my lap.
Ah, child, what caresses
Behind lily-broidered curtains!42
He married, but earned so little money that his wife left him, taking the children with her. Was it to her, or to some less-wonted flame, that he wrote his wistful lines?—
Fair one, when you were here, I filled the house with flowers.
Fair one, now you are gone—only an empty couch is left.
On the couch the embroidered quilt is rolled up; I cannot sleep.
It is three years since you went. The perfume you left behind haunts me still.
The perfume strays about me forever; but where are you, Beloved?
I sigh—the yellow leaves fall from the branch;
I weep—the dew twinkles white on the green mosses.43
He consoled himself with wine, and became one of the “Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove,” who took life without haste, and let their songs and poems earn their uncertain bread. Hearing the wine of Niauchung highly commended, Li set out at once for that city, three hundred miles away.44 In his wanderings he met Tu Fu, who was to be his rival for China’s poetic crown; they exchanged lyrics, went hand in hand like brothers, and slept under the same coverlet until fame divided them. Everybody loved them, for they were as harmless as saints, and spoke with the same pride and friendliness to paupers and kings. Finally they entered Ch’ang-an; and the jolly minister Ho loved Li’s poetry so well that he sold gold ornaments to buy him drinks. Tu Fu describes him:
As for Li Po, give him a jugful,
He will write one hundred poems.
He dozes in a wine-shop
On a city-street of Chang-an;
And though his Sovereign calls,
He will not board the Imperial barge.
“Please, your Majesty,” says he,
“I am a god of wine.”
Those were merry days when the Emperor befriended him, and showered him with gifts for singing the praises of the Pure One, Yang Kwei-fei. Once Ming held a royal Feast of the Peonies in the Pavilion of Aloes, and sent for Li Po to come and make verses in honor of his mistress. Li came, but too drunk for poetry; court attendants threw cold water upon his amiable face, and soon the poet burst into song, celebrating the rivalry of the peonies with Lady Yang:
The glory of trailing clouds is in her garments,
And the radiance of a flower on her face.
O heavenly apparition, found only far above
On the top of the Mountain of Many Jewels,
Or in the fairy Palace of Crystal when the moon is up!
Yet I see her here in the earth’s garden—
The spring wind softly sweeps the balustrade,
And the dew-drops glisten thickly. . . .
Vanquished are the endless longings of love
Borne into the heart on the winds of spring.45
Who would not have been pleased to be the object of such song? And yet the Lady Yang was persuaded that the poet had subtly satirized her; and from that moment she bred suspicion of him in the heart of the King. He presented Li Po with a purse, and let him go. Once again the poet took to the open road, and consoled himself with wine. He joined those “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup” whose drinkings were the talk of Ch’ang-an. He accepted the view of Liu Ling, who desired always to be followed by two servants, one with wine, the other with a spade to bury him where he fell; for, said Liu, “the affairs of this world are no more than duckweed in the river.”46 The poets of China were resolved to atone for the Puritanism of Chinese philosophy. “To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,” said Li Po, “we drained a hundred jugs of wine.”47 And he intones like Omar the gospel of the grape:
The swift stream pours into the sea and returns never more.
Do you not see high on yonder tower
A white-haired one sorrowing before his bright mirror?
In the morning those locks were like black silk,
In the evening they are all like snow.
Let us, while we may, taste the old delights,
And leave not the golden cask of wine
To stand alone in the moonlight. . . .
I desire only the long ecstasy of wine,
And desire not to awaken. . . .
Now let you and me buy wine today!
Why say we have not the price?
My horse spotted with fine flowers,
My fur coat worth a thousand pieces of gold,
These I will take out, and call my boy
To barter them for sweet wine,
And with you twain, let me forget
The sorrow of ten thousand ages!48
What were these sorrows? The agony of despised love? Hardly; for though the Chinese take love as much to heart as we do, their poets do not so frequently intone its pains. It was war and exile, An Lu-shan and the taking of the capital, the flight of the Emperor and the death of Yang, the return of Ming Huang to his desolated halls, that gave Li the taste of human tragedy. “There is no end to war!” he mourns; and then his heart goes out to the women who have lost their husbands to Mars.
’Tis December. Lo, tne pensive maid of Yu-chow!
She will not sing, she will not smile; her
moth eyebrows are disheveled.
She stands by the gate and watches the wayfarers pass,
Remembering him who snatched his sword and went to save the border-land,
Him who suffered bitterly in the cold beyond the Great Wall,
Him who fell in the battle, and will never come back.
In the tiger-striped gold case for her keeping
There remains a pair of white-feathered arrows
Amid the cobwebs and dust gathered of long years—
O empty dreams of love, too sad to look upon!
She takes them out and burns them to ashes.
By building a dam one may stop the flow of the Yellow River,
But who can assuage the grief of her heart when it snows, and the north wind blows?49
We picture him now wandering from city to city, from state to state, much as Tsui Tsung-chi described him: “A knapsack on your back filled with books, you go a thousand miles and more, a pilgrim. Under your sleeves there is a dagger, and in your pocket a collection of poems.”50 In these long wanderings his old friendship with nature gave him solace and an unnamable peace; and through his lines we see his land of flowers, and feel that urban civilization already lay heavy on the Chinese soul:
Why do I live among the green mountains?
I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.
The peach trees are in flower, and the water flows on.51
Or again:
I saw the moonlight before my couch,
And wondered if it were not the frost on the ground.
I raised my head and looked out on the mountain-moon;
I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home.52
Now, as his hair grew white, his heart was flooded with longing for the scenes of his youth. How many times, in the artificial life of the capital, he had pined for the natural simplicity of parentage and home!
In the land of Wu the mulberry leaves are green,
And thrice the silkworms have gone to sleep.
In East Luh, where my family stays,
I wonder who is sowing those fields of ours.
I cannot be back in time for the spring doings,
Yet I can help nothing, traveling on the river.
The south wind, blowing, wafts my homesick spirit
And carries it up to the front of our familiar tavern.
There I see a peach-tree on the east side of the house,
With thick leaves and branches waving in the blue mist.
It is the tree I planted before my parting three years ago.
The peach-tree has grown now as tall as the tavern-roof,
While I have wandered about without returning.
Ping-yang, my pretty daughter, I see you stand
By the peach-tree, and pluck a flowering branch.
You pluck the flowers, but I am not there-
How your tears flow like a stream of water!
My little son, Po-chin, grown up to your sister’s shoulders,
You come out with her under the peach-tree;
But who is there to pat you on the back?
When I think of these things my senses fail,
And a sharp pain cuts my heart every day.
Now I tear off a piece of white silk to write this letter,
And send it to you with my love a long way up the river.53
His last years were bitter, for he had never stooped to make money, and in the chaos of war and revolution he found no king to keep him from starvation. Gladly he accepted the offer of Li-ling, Prince of Yung, to join his staff; but Li-ling revolted against the successor of Ming Huang, and when the revolt was suppressed, Li Po found himself in jail, condemned to death as a traitor to the state. Then Kuo Tsi-i, the general who had put down the rebellion of An Lu-shan, begged that Li Po’s life might be ransomed by the forfeit of his own rank and title. The Emperor commuted the sentence to perpetual banishment. Soon thereafter a general amnesty was declared, and the poet turned his faltering steps homeward. Three years later he sickened and died; and legend, discontent with an ordinary end for so rare a soul, told how he was drowned in a river while attempting, in hilarious intoxication, to embrace the water’s reflection of the moon.
All in all, the thirty volumes of delicate and kindly verse which he left behind him warrant his reputation as the greatest poet of China. “He is the lofty peak of Tai,” exclaims a Chinese critic, “towering above the thousand mountains and hills; he is the sun in whose presence a million stars of heaven lose their scintillating brilliance.”54 Ming Huang and Lady Yang are dead, but Li Po still sings.
My ship is built of spice-wood and has a rudder of mulan;*
Musicians sit at the two ends with jeweled bamboo flutes and pipes of gold.
What a pleasure it is, with a cask of sweet wine
And singing girls beside me,
To drift on the water hither and thither with the waves!
I am happier than the fairy of the air,
Who rode on his yellow crane,
And free as the merman who followed the sea-gulls aimlessly.
Now with the strokes of my inspired pen I shake the Five Mountains.
My poem is done. I laugh, and my delight is vaster than the sea.
O deathless poetry! The songs of Ch’u P’ing† are ever glorious as the sun and moon,
While the palaces and towers of the Chou kings have vanished from the hills.55
V. SOME QUALITIES OF CHINESE POETRY
“Free verse”—“Imagism”—“Every poem a picture and every picture a poem”—Sentimentality—Perfection of form
It is impossible to judge Chinese poetry from Li alone; to feel it (which is better than judging) one must surrender himself unhurriedly to many Chinese poets, and to the unique methods of their poetry. Certain subtle qualities of it are hidden from us in translation: we do not see the picturesque written characters, each a monosyllable, and yet expressing a complex idea; we do not see the lines, running from top to bottom and from right to left; we do not catch the meter and the rhyme, which adhere with proud rigidity to ancient precedents and laws; we do not hear the tones—the flats and sharps—that give a beat to Chinese verse; at least half the art of the Far Eastern poet is lost when he is read by what we should call a “foreigner.” In the original a Chinese poem at its best is a form as polished and precious as a hawthorn vase; to us it is only a bit of deceptively “free” or “imagist” verse, half caught and weakly rendered by some earnest but alien mind.
What we do see is, above all, brevity. We are apt to think these poems too slight, and feel an unreal disappointment at missing the majesty and boredom of Milton and Homer. But the Chinese believe that all poetry must be brief; that a long poem is a contradiction in terms—since poetry, to them, is a moment’s ecstasy, and dies when dragged out in epic reams. Its mission is to see and paint a picture with a stroke, and write a philosophy in a dozen lines; its ideal is infinite meaning in a little rhythm. Since pictures are of the essence of poetry, and the essence of Chinese writing is pictography, the written language of China is spontaneously poetic; it lends itself to writing in pictures, and shuns abstractions that cannot be phrased as things seen. Since abstractions multiply with civilization, the Chinese language, in its written form, has become a secret code of subtle suggestions; and in like manner, and perhaps for a like reason, Chinese poetry combines suggestion with concentration, and aims to reveal, through the picture it draws, some deeper thing invisible. It does not discuss, it intimates; it leaves out more than it says; and only an Oriental can fill it in. “The men of old,” say the Chinese, “reckoned it the highest excellence in poetry that the meaning should be beyond the words, and that the reader should have to think it out for himself.”56 Like Chinese manners and art, Chinese poetry is a matter of infinite grace concealed in a placid simplicity. It foregoes metaphor, comparison and allusion, but relies on showing the thing itself, with a hint of its impl
ications. It avoids exaggeration and passion, but appeals to the mature mind by understatement and restraint; it is seldom romantically excited in form, but knows how to express intense feeling in its own quietly classic way.
Men pass their lives apart like stars that move but never meet.
This eye, how blest it is that the same lamp gives light to both of us!
Brief is youth’s day.
Our temples already tell of waning life.
Even now half of those we know are spirits.
I am moved in the depths of my soul.
We may tire, at times, of a certain sentimentality in these poems, a vainly wistful mood of regret that time will not stop in its flight and let men and states be young forever. We perceive that the civilization of China was already old and weary in the days of Ming Huang, and that its poets, like the artists of the Orient in general, were fond of repeating old themes, and of spending their artistry on flawless form. But there is nothing quite like this poetry elsewhere, nothing to match it in delicacy of expression, in tenderness and yet moderation of feeling, in simplicity and brevity of phrase clothing the most considered thought. We are told that the poetry written under the T’ang emperors plays a large part in the training of every Chinese youth, and that one cannot meet an intelligent Chinese who does not know much of that poetry by heart. If this is so, then Li Po and Tu Fu are part of the answer that we must give to the question why almost every educated Chinese is an artist and a philosopher.
VI. TU FU
T’ao Ch’ien—Po Chü-i—Poems for malaria—Tu Fu and Li Po—A vision of war—Prosperous days—Destitution—Death
Li Po is the Keats of China, but there are other singers almost as fondly cherished by his countrymen. There is the simple and stoic T’ao Ch’ien, who left a government position because, as he said, he was unable any longer to “crook the hinges of his back for five pecks of rice a day”—that is, kow-tow* for his salary. Like many another public man disgusted with the commercialism of official life, he went to live in the woods, seeking there “length of years and depth of wine,” and finding the same solace and delight in the streams and mountains of China that her painters would later express on silk.